Signals and Signs

Introduction

We are never more absent than when fully present and immersed. We are never more present than when we embody our work, and bare our reflections through the body.

Practice

The warm bed wasn’t alluring enough, and though pleasant and comforting, she drew herself from the soft sheets, pulled on a pair of shorts, a tee shirt, socks, and trainers and headed for the car. Minutes later she pulled up by the field and was emptying a bag of white balls onto the tanned grass.

The sun hadn’t long been up and its orange light made the practice ground appear magical. She loved these mornings, cool air on her skin, an orange and red sky, hidden pockets of warm air, a musky aroma rising from the grass.

As she squeezed each shot, it fizzed through the stillness but hardly made a sound as it settled near the white post she was aiming at 70 yards away. And it was always exactly 70 yards to start with. Her grouping of hit balls around the white post suggested she was no normal player, in fact, if you didn’t know better you would swear she had positioned the balls around the post as opposed to hit them from the length of a football pitch away.

Her next shot was so accurate it pitched fully onto the 3-inch-wide post and ricocheted off making a loud crack, it was the only sound in the still air. Movement that stopped with the crack further up the field drew her attention. Three deer had been passing, now, they watched her, motionless, statuettes in the sun’s spotlight. She stared back, not moving, nor breathing, aware of slender legs, long bodies, a dignified and dainty presence. The lead deer turned its head from her to draw the morning through its nostrils, then with its nose it swept the dewy grass. Raising its head again something drew it back on its journey. The other deer looked from her to the larger deer, breathed-in a message hidden in the morning air and followed on.

Her body went back to hitting, but her mind was filled with words. They arrived as silently and unexpected as the deer, they filled her head with joy, as had the deer, like the deer they would not move, so she emptied them out on a piece of paper. The only paper she could find was a page in her yardage book, but the lines came flooding out.

As she wandered off to collect her balls she hummed allowing the words to drop into her melody and out popped a ditty, she wouldn’t be so grandiose to call it a song, but she sang it just the same, maybe to herself, maybe to the deer, or maybe to remind her of that moment with the deer.

Wadebridge Town Hall and Our First Encounter

“You see that woman over there” Tom, my coresearcher, said, pointing toward a short, sinewy, purposefully moving woman: hair white, body erect, wearing trousers and a pullover, “You’ve got to speak to her.”

I didn’t need to be told twice, his word was enough, and like an eagle watching its prey, my eyes never left the woman, so keen was I to grab this important participant. While I might have been in a hurry, the woman I was so eagerly watching, wasn’t. She paused at each exhibit at the, “Life begins at 50” exhibition, reading information and talking with exhibitors.

At the time neither Tom or I knew the woman in question was 83 years old and, although born in Devon, had lived and worked in Cornwall most of her life. Neither of us knew she lived alone since the death of her husband 30 years ago, and neither of us imagined that this woman would, in a week’s time, invite us into her home, make us a pot of tea, and begin to change the way we conducted research.

That first visit had been interesting on several counts. It was interesting to hear how this woman described being unable to tell people that she had painted her bedroom ceiling because they would try and stop her going up a ladder. It had been interesting how the house had been cleared of furniture save for the kitchen, one bedroom, and the sitting room. It had been interesting the way the woman looked mainly at Tom all the way through the interview. And it was amusing that, despite how women in their 80s are portrayed as supposedly vulnerable, this 83-year-old woman wasn’t the slightest bit hesitant in telling us very assuredly, “Actually, I prefer if you didn’t!” when we asked if we could use a tape recorder to record the interview.

Note taking had not been this researcher’s strong point. Nevertheless, words and sentences were noted and, where possible, verbatim. Across the table from me, Tom seemed to be adapting to note taking and we worked and watched each other trying to document the contours of the woman’s story. Sensing that “Nell” the pseudonym chosen by the woman must be getting tired and with note books bulging we headed for a debrief. Well actually, we needed a pause to honor the moment, to share our thoughts and reflections and to embed the insights shared with us.

Alone, the next day, on my own sitting room floor I began to try to make sense of the words I had so sincerely tried to note accurately. I thought about our research questions; I asked the notes to reveal to me what physical activity may have meant to Nell.

I looked at the sketches I had made of the kitchen: the old kettle; the worn green doors of the scullery; the dented century-old wooden table strewn with books, notes, letters, writings; the deep sink beneath the window; the pictures; the worn arm chair in front of the fire; and the pile of wood. They reminded me of being in Nell’s world for a few moments.

I thought about our journey to Nell’s house, and about the difficulty we had finding it, tucked away amongst a labyrinth of lanes. I thought about the steep hill that led to her house and about how we had watched her cycle off that first day we saw her as we ate our sandwiches on the edge of town. Where on her page, were the answers? Where were the words that would untangle this web? What signs were there?

I began circling sentences where Nell had been describing her life, particularly looking for times she mentioned any type of physical activity: walking, running, cycling, climbing; they were all there. I looked for how they had been described, and began feel a glimpse of what I experienced talking to Nell.

Nell had said, “There’s a sound about a place when it’s waking up,” “a buzz,” I couldn’t help smile, I knew that buzz too, I knew those words spoken by Nell resonated with my own experience as I went, early in the morning into the waking world. All those years playing professional sport, I would get up before everyone else and go and practice. Other pros thought I was mad.

“So I would go out,” Nell had said, “before the world wakes up.” Yes, yes, yes, I knew that too, that’s what I did, “there’s great joy in these things.” I thought about my early morning runs now; the magic in those moments, then continued slowly panning, “still now I have a lot of childishness, things that people don’t notice.”

Unaware of how much time had elapsed sifting, sorting, and editing, finally the composition was pleasing, though not daring to bestow on my work the term “poem” an onlooker may have deduced that at the end of whatever length of time I had spent, there stood a five stanza’d poem, entitled A Woman of 83.

A Woman of 83

Another Step

For some, the move from scientific texts to songs is a big step, especially when that individual has separated their academic self, as Tom had, from their creative, artistic self. For me the move to a song didn’t provoke me to rejoin with something that had been severed or denied. But, it did require me to think through where the desire to create a song came from; to consider why I wanted to write a song from my research. What purpose would it bring? What would it contribute that couldn’t be learned or presented in another way? What new, or alternative insights would it allow?

There wasn’t a moment when I decided to attend to these issues: they had been there all along in our discussions, but, because Tom identified himself as a singer songwriter, and I didn’t, we would always focus on his knowing and his learning about song writing.

We called it “the seat” because we sat on it so often. Of course, it’s just a seat among thousands you will come across on the British coast, this one little more than an old decaying wooden bench on the headland. I would often park my car nearby, sleep overnight, and then awake to a turquoise ocean that was rarely still, that view seems to move me, no matter how often I look. After breakfast, I like to sit and sing to the ocean. I wrote the song about the fisherwoman on that seat: it took weeks before I could find the last line. I wanted to ask Tom to help. I wanted him to share in the creation. When finally the right words came, they were amazing, they fitted in a way I hadn’t expected them to, they brought a closure I didn’t think possible, and it was like someone else produced them. The lesson, of waiting, gave me a degree of confidence to trust and to keep searching for something when a song didn’t feel right, or wasn’t complete or when I couldn’t rightly express something.

That morning, I had some words in my note book about another participant, Mrs. Jones we’ll call her. Mrs. Jones was very different to Nell, “If we were to give you a pseudonym,” we asked “what would it be?” “I’d like to be called Sophia,” said this short, stocky 81-year-old, “after, Sophia Loren,” Mrs. Jones had a sparkle in her eye.

I had a picture in my head of a child wanting to escape her chores and going to the beach, both themes in Sophia’s life story. Then there was the dancing. Sophia told a story about her husband complaining, “You say you’ve got all these aches and pains but you can still go dancing,” and she’d said, “You know what Norman, as soon as the music starts I ain’t got an ache or a pain nowhere.”

On another scrap of paper in my note book was scribbled, “father died, working as a child, missing school.” Hidden in my body was an awareness of the implications of never learning to write. But there was no interview transcript, no researcher’s notebook, no meticulous field notes, no qualitative software package; just embedded embers waiting to be fanned.

As I sat on the seat on this morning, playing random chords that I liked the sound of, a particular rhythm I was experimenting with seemed to take shape. I was drawn to play these particular chords over and over again. They were different to any chord progression I had played before and in that moment, they seemed to bring together my strands of thought about Sophia’s life. Plucked in this particular way the chords seemed to emphasize a particular pace. Was it the rhythm of life for a story waiting to be told?

I wasn’t attending to what we “actually” talked about, but rather the spirit of the interaction, the chemistry, of something shared that went unsaid.

As I began thinking about Sophia describing her father’s death, a cloud eclipsed the sun that had been warming me, I felt sunlight going so fast from my body and that experience of cold at that moment seemed to take me to the start of Sophia’s story, I wrote, “Sunlight came and went so fast,” then, on the next line, “winter chill and father passed,” and an ache and uncertainty in both our stories was uncovered as I remembered in my own life how death can cool life in an instant.

As I thought through other events in Sophia’s life words and sentences were corralled when they flowed with the story plot. The chord changes in the song allowed me keep the important themes simultaneously bubbling, while the rhythm moved the journey on. When some words describing events placed in the story didn’t fit lyrically, I tried another word. When I didn’t know what words should come next, I just plucked chords and allowed the rhythm to move without words until places fell into the rhythm: the sands, the fields, the towans ¹ between the village and the beach, moments, dancing, time, growing, becoming, being. A call to action, a call to resistance. Jostling for space in the rhythm of life: the space was where we connected.

Gwithian Sands

I wondered some time later whose song is this? Whose story? I could see connections between Sophia’s life and my own, and I wondered if I was always writing my own life when writing others lives? Of course, some events in the story were not mine: I wasn’t born during the war, I didn’t work as a child, I don’t have children, I know how to write, yet, there was a pace to the passing of time and of events, that did mirror my own; an ache, and the call to run and dance.

I saw that while knitting this woman’s life together in a song, I had knitted my own life into it and the song seemed to, in Josselson’s (1996) terms, bridge the space that separated us. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t this woman, or that the song couldn’t tell all, or that it couldn’t “re-present” her, the song provided a vehicle, an open invitation for connection, to, “be with.”

On a different level, I wondered if I was playing a part in the collective remembering of community stories of women: that this woman’s voice should not be lost, that this woman’s place in history should be marked; and Gwithian Sands was a modest way to stand with those who have gone before, me a female, using those parts of me that tie our stories together and as a call to others to not only stand with us, but also to dance with us?

I am more aware now, that this song was one answer to my grappling with what goes unsaid in an interview. The song writing process had evoked an embodied remembering of the connections forged during the interview, of movement, breaths, glances, the timing of interactions.

But, it seems, connections aren’t just forged during a research interview, and my body remembers other breaths, glances, and happenings too, that swirl around us across the passage of time. So, while considering whether or not I should be writing songs from my research I also began to think about other songs I write, those that “pop out,” when I’m not necessarily thinking about a participant, songs that I didn’t consider are connected to my research, the ditties.

Writing

Signals & Signs

Reflections

In embryonic form this performance has been shared with colleagues and friends in a variety of social settings. It was first performed publicly at the Contemporary Ethnography Across the Disciplines Conference at the University of Waikato, in 2010. A developed section was subsequently performed in May 2011 at the Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Illinois and in its current form in July, 2011, at the British Sociological Association, Auto/Biography Conference at the University of Reading. I am thankful to colleagues, friends, and other audiences for sharing their reflections. The following points capture some of the discussions and issues I have since become more aware of.

The initial incentive for creating the performance was to respond to questions David Carless and I have been asked about song writing following performances of “Across the Tamar” (Douglas & Carless, 2005, 2006), “Under One Roof” (Carless & Douglas, 2010a, 2010b) and “Drawing on the Body” (Carless & Douglas, 2009; Douglas & Carless, 2010). While a great deal has been written about poetic representations, less has been written about the potential of songs and song writing to inform social science research and practice; the recent work of Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Carolyn Ellis (2009) an exception. Through adopting a showing as opposed to telling approach (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Frank, 1995, 2000), my hope was to uncloak what can seem to be a mysterious process. Rather than write about how narrative, creative analytic practice (CAP, Richardson, 2000) and performative methodologies informs the song writing process, I aspired to perform them so that the usually hidden and problematic, “partial, plural, incomplete, and contingent understandings” (Denzin, 2003, p. 8) were exposed. While I acknowledge that it is impossible to transform the embodied act of performing songs to a textual presentation on the page, my reflections here accompanying the performance text are a modest attempt to resist silence (Pelias, 1999, p. ix).

It seems that for many scholars creating and singing a song, as a way of understanding or presenting their work, is an inaccessible mode of inquiry. In part, this stems from a perception that an individual must be able to sing competently, write music and play an instrument before engaging in the song writing process. While there is some truth to the belief that in order to produce a “professional performance” that includes songs, a degree of competence is necessary, the three song writing moments I reflect on here challenge the view that an individual has to be skilled before embarking on a song writing journey. Each song writing moment included in the performance provides an example of different levels of competence, maturity, and skill, and draws attention to how an individual’s particular journey and events in their life influence what is created.

The performance is a reminder to me that some songs and poems never see the light of day, as in the first story, but, nonetheless, are important steps to learning and refining a skill. These first steps can begin to sensitize an individual, can document life, and can be great fun. Other songs and poems are embedded within research practice and an intention to “dance the data” (Blumenfeld-Jones, 2002) as in the poem, “A woman of 83” and the song, “Gwithian Sands.” These creations are likely to be judged both for their aesthetic merit as well as what they add or contribute to understanding and insight. Yet other songs emerge from an unconscious response to “being in the world” and making time to reflect with a guitar (Carless, 2010; Carless & Douglas, 2009).